Blood spatter on high
鈥淏e prepared!鈥� This enduring motto of the Scout movement will come to mind for many readers of a paper called 鈥�: Observations of a pilot study in the next frontier of forensic science鈥�.
Reader Sara Rosenbaum alerted Feedback to the explicitly stated first purpose of the research: 鈥渢he investigation of eventual violent criminal acts that occur outside of Earth鈥檚 environment鈥�.
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This is forensic science at its most future-is-almost-here-istic. And at its most efficiently British-American collaborative-crime-investigation-istic. The researchers are at Staffordshire University and the University of Hull in the UK, and in the US at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and the Roswell Police Department in Georgia.
鈥淲e hypothesize,鈥� they write, 鈥渢hat if gravity is removed as an acting force on a blood drop in flight, then the calculated angle of impact will be more accurate.鈥�
They ran, or rather flew, their tests aboard a parabolic flight research aeroplane, departing and landing at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. (Fort Lauderdale, like many cities in Florida, is accustomed to blood spatter. The city has during the period 2020 to 2023, according to statistics reported by the local police department鈥檚 Crime Analysis Unit.)
In the experiments, 鈥渁 1-cc syringe containing the blood analog was used to project the fluid in a stream on a flight path of approximately 20 cm length that would intercept with a 16.5 cm 脳 16.5 cm target [made of] 50 lb. paper affixed to a foam board backing鈥�.
The study says liquid drops that struck the paper at a 90-degree angle behaved much as the traditional forensic blood-spatter equations predict. But 鈥� and this is a challenge to stir the blood of forensic scientists and true-crime aficionados alike 鈥� someone needs to come up with better equations for predicting what happens at other angles.
Thinking: inside the box
Seeing brings believing, sometimes. Feeling, listening and reasoning 鈥� when combined 鈥� can be just as powerful.
Sholei Croom, Hanbei Zhou and Chaz Firestone, all at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, explain in the journal PNAS how they tried to answer the question 鈥�
They filmed volunteers who 鈥渟hook an opaque box and attempted to determine i) the number of objects hidden inside, or ii) the shape of the objects inside鈥�. They then had other people watch the videos and try to determine 鈥渨ho was shaking for number and who was shaking for shape鈥�. Most observers were pretty good at recognising who was shaking for which.
Back in 2017, Myrthe Plaisier at Delft University and Jeroen Smeets at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, both in the Netherlands, told attendees at the IEEE World Haptics Conference in F眉rstenfeldbruck, Germany, about a project they called 鈥�
Their method was simple: 鈥渨e investigated how accurately participants can judge the number of wooden spheres inside a small handheld box by shaking the box鈥�. Plaisier and Smeets discovered, they say, that 鈥減articipants could perform this task accurately for up to about 3 spheres, while for larger numbers they systematically underestimated the numerosity鈥�. The larger numbers they tested were four and five. The situation with quantities above that, in theory, remains unknown.
Stick to fruit
Many scientists would be unable to say whether metal sticks to fruit.
It does, generally speaking, if properly coaxed. News of this comes in a study called 鈥溾�� by Wenhao Xu, Faraz Burni and Srinivasa Raghavan, who are all at the University of Maryland.
Writing in the journal ACS Central Science, they announce: 鈥淲e have discovered that hard, electrical conductors (e.g., metals or graphite) can be adhered to soft, aqueous materials (e.g., hydrogels, fruit, or animal tissue) without the use of an adhesive. The adhesion is induced by a low DC electric field鈥� [This] can even be achieved underwater, where typical adhesives cannot be used.鈥�
Anticipating a flurry of people aghast at such a simple effect being essentially unknown until now, the study says: 鈥淭he experiments are very simple.鈥�
Accidental genital glow
Faraz Alam sent us a study that he and colleagues at Imperial College London published in 2013 in the journal PLoS One, saying: 鈥淗ere is the paper where I accidentally made genitalia glow in the dark.鈥� The title is 鈥溾��. Those genitalia were in mice.
That spurred Feedback to recall a paper 鈥� about humans 鈥� that P. A. Macdonald and M. Sydney Margolese published in 1950 in Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey. They called it 鈥溾��.
These are examples, both, of how scientists sometimes gain awareness of biological wonders.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and聽co-founded聽the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is聽.
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